thought a tile that was an actual tile was the cover of a book & I liked that better.
today cj said that bad bad was like the best scarf in the world & the cow was like, a real body.
I would rather have the best scarf in the world : I'd rather look good than feel good : I'd rather "..."
elegance requires a lIne outside of the body : : a flight. becoming a nothing a new generation, lives inbetween, is via transition. the becoming-body is a copy : : it is born of a body, it sees bodies it consumes them it can't help it it is coded. then the body is not a body it is a product shaped like a body. the difference has something to do with the scope of the word "organic."
((to eat a body, to be made & aware of bodies feels disgusting. becoming-digusted & knowing,
we call that capitalism))
in 27 trucks of cotton corpulence = less. a kind of becoming a suspension in flesh. if a body is such a constant tense, is that which does not work, a joint : form + infinity ++ the now opens up.
"all time is a piece of shit, nothing but a warning" : a body is opened, totally. then pain raises an alarm redwhiteblue no one can see then the body is just
++++nutrition, you have to, otherwise inorganic. thus not alive, totally empty : : a costume is worn [by] the body ! a beautiful scarf worn by a beautiful body that is form : :
there are two kinds of irises -- a wild iris it is lovely because it has to; a hothouse iris it puts on a show; a wrecked body beautiful because blinded, bound; the love of a fascist, the first boot-licker, the drain of a drama by which a body encounters the same
[&] the oppo(site) an organ exposed, a wild iris all of its functions on show. also, when you're so hungry you have to eat a baby. your copy. the front porch. a nonsense song your own lung so :
: an emptying an inbetween that's love, requires a body : beauty : : this is how this works : if you have to suck a gun still alive = lovely.
to suck down death, court a bullethole emptiness : blast : : oversaturated : : because the voice is too large for the body it must accessorize boldly ! a becoming accessory, a girl-ing :
elegance because a skeleton : : (form) : : opened a busted body : if god wanted wholeness he wouldn't have asked, a hole knight thru the apocryphal mass; even then & then all the bloody virgins clairvoyant : because a mode which is "violence" - (decline:) - "deprivation" : a motivational speaker dressed in hearts speaks to analysis, writing a worm-bin recycled only known substance --
the names of the raw : no hunger : immaterial : : girl : fly out (of [line]) away : an invisible cartography mapped in the making "..."
also : if it is processed then someone must like it. like, no one would go through the trouble of milking if it were vile : : a body of meat is pure by which I mean bloody unprocessed probably diseased but this is how this works : meat begets meat begets meat begets : a dairy the maids smile cultivated it's a disease : : so the theater is a cheese not a meat : consider --
[ fill in blanks/holes/texts/omissions/ as you see fit ]
today cj said that bad bad was like the best scarf in the world & the cow was like, a real body.
I would rather have the best scarf in the world : I'd rather look good than feel good : I'd rather "..."
elegance requires a lIne outside of the body : : a flight. becoming a nothing a new generation, lives inbetween, is via transition. the becoming-body is a copy : : it is born of a body, it sees bodies it consumes them it can't help it it is coded. then the body is not a body it is a product shaped like a body. the difference has something to do with the scope of the word "organic."
((to eat a body, to be made & aware of bodies feels disgusting. becoming-digusted & knowing,
we call that capitalism))
in 27 trucks of cotton corpulence = less. a kind of becoming a suspension in flesh. if a body is such a constant tense, is that which does not work, a joint : form + infinity ++ the now opens up.
"all time is a piece of shit, nothing but a warning" : a body is opened, totally. then pain raises an alarm redwhiteblue no one can see then the body is just
++++nutrition, you have to, otherwise inorganic. thus not alive, totally empty : : a costume is worn [by] the body ! a beautiful scarf worn by a beautiful body that is form : :
there are two kinds of irises -- a wild iris it is lovely because it has to; a hothouse iris it puts on a show; a wrecked body beautiful because blinded, bound; the love of a fascist, the first boot-licker, the drain of a drama by which a body encounters the same
[&] the oppo(site) an organ exposed, a wild iris all of its functions on show. also, when you're so hungry you have to eat a baby. your copy. the front porch. a nonsense song your own lung so :
: an emptying an inbetween that's love, requires a body : beauty : : this is how this works : if you have to suck a gun still alive = lovely.
to suck down death, court a bullethole emptiness : blast : : oversaturated : : because the voice is too large for the body it must accessorize boldly ! a becoming accessory, a girl-ing :
elegance because a skeleton : : (form) : : opened a busted body : if god wanted wholeness he wouldn't have asked, a hole knight thru the apocryphal mass; even then & then all the bloody virgins clairvoyant : because a mode which is "violence" - (decline:) - "deprivation" : a motivational speaker dressed in hearts speaks to analysis, writing a worm-bin recycled only known substance --
the names of the raw : no hunger : immaterial : : girl : fly out (of [line]) away : an invisible cartography mapped in the making "..."
also : if it is processed then someone must like it. like, no one would go through the trouble of milking if it were vile : : a body of meat is pure by which I mean bloody unprocessed probably diseased but this is how this works : meat begets meat begets meat begets : a dairy the maids smile cultivated it's a disease : : so the theater is a cheese not a meat : consider --
[ fill in blanks/holes/texts/omissions/ as you see fit ]
What fascinates me here is the concept of drama—the theatre, the script—as both performance and as literature. Certainly, in CJ’s submissions, most of the actions /seem/ like they simply could not be acted out on an actual stage. For most theatre companies, it would be impossible to produce a remotely realistic play in which people have their eyeballs sucked out or are divided by hurricanes which somehow morph into “a series of legs of living flesh” to borrow from Artaud’s lovely bit. Although in Artaud’s case his own ideal theatre might be able to produce such an effect, the truth of the matter is that the stage is ultimately a limited form: unlike television and film productions which allow for editing after the fact, which allow for CGI and special effects beyond standard human capacity, theatre productions are limited to the gestures and props suited to suggesting events to viewers, to indicating what is supposed to have happened and what is actually going on. Theatre, then, has always seemed like an art of insinuation… (This may or may not have any legitimate theoretical basis; I haven’t studied drama in any way beyond high school practical application.) In any case, theatre cannot do all the things that film now allows us to do.
ReplyDeleteAnd, in the same vein, it does not (traditionally) do the same work that literature does. This is not to say that plays cannot be great literature; they must certainly can, have been, and will continue to be. But they occupy a space which is—typically—fundamentally different from fiction/nonfiction/poetry: unlike texts which are written with the assumption that viewers must generate all necessary images required to flesh out characters and events (must, therefore, be supplied with copious details, descriptions, and explanation), plays seem to be largely written with the knowledge that openness is necessary: the script does not need to fill in each detail of each character because there will be a physical presence on the stage doing that. We do not need to have each event described for us because living actors can make voiceless gestures which are generally understood by audiences (the script does not need to describe the fury the character is feeling if, for example, she lunges for his throat). Literature is fascinating because it implies a voice through symbols, letters on a page, which in turn imply emotions, images, concepts, etc. to readers.
Theatre, playwriting more like, is fascinating because it exists in a sort of in-between space, written on a page but meant to be heard—voiced in a way that reading literature aloud can not produce, and tied to literary devices in a way that film can sometimes circumscribe. The most detailed productions depend on the strength of their scripts, but the scripts themselves depend on the physical presence of the production. The relationship between the two is integral and unavoidable; literature exists without reception, as does film, but theatre seems to come fully into being only when it is presented in full, the script carried out by breathing bodies for an audience of breathing bodies. Theatre feels, ultimately, like a largely “living” art, concerned with transference of tone and gesture and reliant, in many ways, on human capacity, the fat, the "real body."
So then what, exactly, are scripts which cannot (without seemingly impossible efforts) be acted out on stage? What is a script which, following the conventions of playwriting and leaving out each minute movement, gesture, and description—or stepping beyond playwriting and including actions which are generally impossible for a stage—ultimately does not seem meant for a stage? Like theatre, in-between imitation of life and literature, this form seems to exist in-between, demanding full fruition in the form of birth-onto-stage and simultaneously impossible to give birth to… It exists as a sort of corpse text, seizing, jerking, imitating life. It is Artaud’s living flesh body parts, separated from each other, all the right parts but denied the image of the ultimate whole.
ReplyDeleteThe play which cannot be fully realized on a stage is, then, a text full of holes, blank moments between indicated gesture and indicated speech, an abyss of possibility not unlike the wordless exchanges between Lucy and Brazil in our Parks play last week. As I mentioned then, there feels as if there is a dark welling up inside each of these moments (motions) which should be filled by words, by stage direction, by voices which could not be heard even if they did exist. This, naturally, is fascinating to me—a presence in the text which can be perceived but not grasped, proven but not explained. The Great Hole of History which ultimately feels as if it fills, rather than empties. What occurred in the time between Cate disappearing from the bathroom and returning with the baby? What is it that she cannot finish saying? Where is it that she goes, when she goes? These holes exist—and can exist—because the text dwells (lurks, haunts) the space between literature and performance, physical and intellectual (although those are terrible terms for the two, I hope you all know what I mean.)
I’m also very interested in the way violence in discussed/enacted/illustrated in virtually all of these pieces... Particularly, obviously, the love stories... but I’m not sure if I can fully articulate my thoughts on this front. In some ways, it feels as if the violence that occurs in these pieces is almost absolutely essential, the ultimate inability of these texts to exist in one space or another producing an sort of infinite tension machine which works itself out on the bodies on the characters which may or may not exist. But I think there’s so much more to said on this… I would really love it if someone could spend some time talking about the role of violence in theatre—how it differs, in particular, from violence being used in our poetry, or in literature, which feels, oddly enough, more direct, more explicit in strange ways—does the presence of the violence in these texts, which are supposedly “plays,” that is, not real, not really enacted, become palatable because it “isn’t real”? Is there even the sensation that the violence here is stage violence? I don’t know how I feel about that whole topic yet, so I’ll just sign off for now.
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ReplyDeleteReading the texts for this week, I was reminded of the transfer (or registering) of horror through or in bodies in the form of shudders in Laura Mullen's Tales of Horror. In “The Experimental Ordinary: Deleuze on Eating and Anorexic Elegance,” we’re told that anorexia involves “experimentation with the production of visual signs” (the “atmospheric” quality of manners means that they, in external relation, move “impersonally through the bodies of others”); anorexia is a disturbance of (or opposition to) form(s), an “entering into an existence of becoming.” In “Three Love Stories,” Suzanne Lacy couples figures of speech with the disturbing images of body parts (the disturbance comes, maybe, not so much from the pictures solely but from the fact that the figures of speech: “tie my stomach in knots,” “you steal my breath away, she gasped,” etc.--become (not wholly) literal but also visual) (like the articulation of the “world” as “well-made” that signals the “madness of Heaven” in “Spurt of Blood,” where the off-rhyme of “Bawd” and “God” echo in the ear and produce a bite? this might be too far).
ReplyDeleteIn thinking, too, about Carina’s discussion of how bodies are figured, produced, shot through, busted, and opened (and Amanda’s point about the physical presence/embodiment of text on stage, the in-between state of theatre, the larval-ish nature of a script), I’m wondering if we can experience these texts in terms of a visual-verbal (/auditory) chain of (or at the intersection of?) shuttering/studdering/stuttering (a being eaten alive? Ugh, I think I’m ventriloquising my poem (or it/me)—but hear me out—a consumption is not a consumption but an externalizing, a fit, a motion (but an almost obliterating one, like a swoon?)). Cate, in “Blasted” stutters wildly (gun in hand at one point) indicating and producing an agitation; she passes out (and through this agitated state, threatens to pass out) throughout the play. Live bodies stink (in speech) as much as dead ones; Ian’s lung tries to cough its way out; the dead baby on the cross is akin to a spit (Cate’s retching earlier is answered in the eating at the end of the play?). Flora’s head is both “buzzy” and “fuzzy” as begins to overheat with agitation as Silva Vicarro questions her in “27 Wagons Full of Cotton” (and her husband’s arm (wrist)-twisting has left a visible mark--she is an accessory to his crime). The stutter-shudder-stutter of these texts both contributes to and enacts (/produces?) their violence.
I think Arsic’s conclusion is incompatible with the rest of her thoughts. She spends her essay telling us about how anti-human the anorexic is, and then she subjects it to the most human trope: “Oh, well, if she’s dies, that’d be a pity.” Excuse you? How can the anorexic die? Death is word, therefore, in Lacan’s world, death doesn’t mean anything, it’s a symbol for something, which is beyond human’s reach, because human’s can never obtain their actual desires, they can only get at some generic, rip-off brand of it. The anorexic, is not applicable to people discourse. She’s not one brand; she’s not only Kraft or Sara Lee, because her identity derives from infinite tiny pieces of leftover food. A cheesecake crumb merges with a piece of lettuce with a sip of Cola. This is not coherence. When you hail the anorexic, you’re not hailing an autonomous person, but a monstrosity of discarded food bits from numerous sources and labels. Arsic says that she “opposes the symbolic,” and makes a “chart of newly invented signs.” Her signifiers aren’t those of individual people. The gestures of Allegra Versace, my favorite anorexic, aren’t those of America Ferrera, who’s not anorexic. They’re in two different spheres. So it was confounding for Arsic to qualify her argument with fatality, considering death is something that concerns humans (Ferrera), not un-humans (Versace). You can’t kill Versace, she has no organism, only crumbs. How can you kill a crumb? You can throw it in the wastebasket, but that doesn’t mean that the anorexic won’t retrieve it. What does the anorexic care if it’s been in the trash? Trash is only bad in the human world, not her’s.
ReplyDeleteThe anorexic hears its stomach grumbling and it says “h-e-l-l no!” Deleuze says the anorexic refuses its “organism” Good for it! Fuck the body! Fuck bones, blood, hearts, and other organs. These are slimy, meaty things: they look ugly. If Lacey handed me her heart, I wouldn’t take it. I don’t want something that’s been inside a human, that’s signifies civilization. I want something else. I want Allegra Versace. Why should anyone sit down and eat a full meal? These are not good war tactics. First off, to eat a full meal requires you to be motionless for a certain period of time. And while your stagnant, the enemy (fill in your own enemies) is probably moving against you. And while British is amassing weapons from America, what are you doing? You’re eating steak and potatoes -- please! Move! But you can’t, because even after you’ve finished your meal, you’re all full and bloated and probably have to crap. These dispositions lead to further inertia, and by the time you’ve digested your meal, you’re country is split into a half democracy/ half communist state. All because you ate!
Allegra doesn’t eat. She’s a Nazi. She collects “particles” from “somebody else’s plate” and these mishmash of myriad elements fuse together to form an ultra-light, super-flexible super-Aryan. The Nazis, among their other achievements, invaded France, Netherlands, and Belgium simultaneously. This means that the Nazi body is one capable of spreading, it’s not composed of material human flesh, but it’s a virus that latches on to anything and incorporates it and corrupts it. The German leaders had Europe. The anorexic has her food particles. They both embrace the concept of multitudinous, prolific identities. Hitler proclaimed that his movement would confound normalistic country ties. He even banned the use of the word “Germany.” Hitler wanted to be everywhere. The anorexic denies the singleness of the organism. It is confining. Deleuze says the anorexic “escapes constraint of lack and hunger.” So typical needs and benchmarks (like food, like human rights) are supplanted by an avariciousness that builds its base on a variety of things instead of one thing. The anorexic “weakens her will to believe in the “I’.” Singleness shatters and melts. The anorexic becomes an ocean: she makes waves that splash everywhere and get everybody else wet. Unlike masochism, anorexia involves more than two participants. She doesn’t gather leftovers from one person’s plate, but from a bunch. She doesn’t wage war against a single country, but a variety of them. She’s cunning, she’s greedy: she’s a tyrant.
ReplyDeleteThanks CJ, Seth & Carina for some interesting reads.
ReplyDeleteAs a result, I am thinking about inequity and violence., especially in "27 Wagons Full of Cotton." The body can be made to bear the violence, to repeat Jen, and it seems like the anger and violence gets displaced to a body less able to met it with similar force, as with Flora or with the various verbal slurs about disabilities or minority groups. I find this incredibly disturbing and seem to be caught in the violence. This idea of being sucked into the written wounds made me think about the rhizome. I wonder if it is violence that creates the holes and violence that sustains and replicates itself as a hole. It is both seductive and repulsive. It has all the properties of Derrida's supplement. It is what destroys us but also in some way makes us complete.
So if the ever increasing hole has a relationship to violence, why does violence roll downwards and not a lateral or upwards movement? Why in 27 Wagons must the woman be made to pay? Why in Artaud do scorpions and so forth come out of the wet nurses vagina and why in "Blasted" is Cate both loved and abused by Ian?
Does art buy into the power structures by replicating the equity? does art have it's own subversive power or does it mask the subversive power of the ruling class?
Pain, it is said is the only thing we can know, but the moment it is gone we can not precisely recall it. So the body/mind are our only recall to the results of violence. It is the endless chain of the supplement.
So don’t know what to do with this jumble of texts this round – I enjoyed them all but at the same time they feel all jumbled up in my head in a very inarticulate way. I also find plays really interesting in regards to points of access – when I read them I usually find myself feeling locked out of the play because I have a difficult time imagining the characters and making them move like claymation in my head – I find them difficult to animate and interact with. I’ve seen a little bit of Kazan’s Baby Doll – and am familiar with Karl Malden’s voice so he was more easily animated in my head – but I had more trouble with the others. I think least of all the Sarah Kane piece because the dialogue was short and (I can’t think of a better word) punchy? Or perhaps more punctuated? The visuals in Lacey’s work also kept me engaged. The Artaud was the strangest for me. perhaps I lack imagination when it comes to plays…
ReplyDeleteI’m really interested in all this interaction with the body and the body as this kind of site? Where all of these things are taking place – have happened/ing. I’m interested in the melding of clothing and body and the (seeming) domination of the clothing over the body so that the skin melts into cloth and cloth into skin. which for me means that the body becomes a site of art – not in the sense of a tattoo but in a material sense of body as actual woven canvas material – body as something to be sewn with decorative stitches – and I know that such body mods exist but they’re not in the same in my head – or I’m thinking about them in different ways. But the body skin, flesh, organs, etc because the site rather than having external direction it’s internal.
The skin then becomes this permeable membrane - and clothes/cloth becomes less of a decoration than pieces of flesh that are mangled and attached to the body Frankenstein style and the body adapts and assimilates the its new flesh.
And from what I understand of 27 Wagons of Cotton – a lot of that is about access to the body – to Flora’s body a kind of masochism going on there with the whip and confession – but I’m still unsure as how that relates to the masochism in The Experimental Ordinary and how these things relate to one another. Also this tension between how the body is figured in the play versus carroll baker in the movie. The elasticity of the skin to become something that it isn’t.
I’m really grasping at how to contextualize all these pieces with one another – not that we have to – of course, but I think it’d help me… I feel like these are very hole-y texts a lot taken out and a lot missing but maybe (probably) I feel that way generally when I read a play – holes that I don’t know how to thread yet or what to try to put in them…
Much like Kim I feel a bit forced into being honest and admitting that I didn't much know what to do with the 'texts' this week--plays in this form are strange to me, Kim really articulated this well enough I won't rehash it, buy 'claymation' is very apt I think; whereas in a novel or in poetry I feel it's part of the artistic 'production' (whatever sits between writer / reader, not exactly an exchange...) that my imagination fuels the experience / 'vision' of the work, but in drama, a play, a movie, it feels more one-sided to me, and without the 'vision' of the director / whoever I feel lost, it's clear I'm able to fill in all those gaps myself, but with this type of art I simply don't want to, I'm not interested in that--like reading a movie script--there is something to be had there but if I'm looking for Herzog or Luc Besson then so much of the intrigue of that art to me is the handling of it by someone other than myself.
ReplyDeleteI guess that's a rambling way of speaking around my poor articulation that I don't feel like I have the language / education / experience in drama so I don't know how to talk about it because I've never felt like I wanted to, and now that I 'need' to I've got nothing to work with. I'm sure there's an interesting discussion to be had here about genre and 'hybrid blah blah' (okay maybe not so interesting? it could be I'm sure) about where poetry may stop / begin in the constellation of art near / far away from drama, how it is / what it means that we've spent so much time on drama & plays (themselves, their aesthetic lexicons, etc.) in a poetry workshop, etc., but it isn't the conversation that seems at hand so I won't beg the issue. I guess I’m not really that interested in it myself, I don’t mind being narrow in this way, to some extent labels and genres are not only necessary but I think can be very liberating (the power of constraints) and powerful, so at some horizon we’ve got to stake if not a claim then a worldview that says ‘x is poetry, y is not’ and I’m interested in x not y, etc. etc. so that’s all I can think to offer.
'Three Love Stories' was interesting to me, it's obviously very conceptual but the concept was actually lacking to me (i.e., nothing surprising about the irony of love language juxtaposed with the gory literalizations, etc.) though it's always interesting to think how repulsed we are by our own bodies, mostly the parts not often seen unless Something Terrible has happened. I loved it regardless, I enjoyed the 'substance' more than the concept, the photographs were stark and compelling; the facial expressions when there was a face were surprisingly diverse, sometimes striking me as very goofy / comical, other times more emotionally heavy.
“Because I have to fast, I can’t help it”, said the Hunger artist…,lifting his shriveled head a little, and puckering his lips as if for a kiss, he spoke right into the supervisor’s ear, so that nothing would be missed.
ReplyDeleteThis is the moment of confession/purging of Hunger artist.
At the moment of purging Hunger artist seeks a kiss.
Hunger artist lacks name. His art replaced his name.
Anorexia makes the body into abstract transcendence , Hunger Artist’s Art was to fast. But there is no safe distance that transcendence provides in anorexia. Nor immediacy of ecstasy, or self-expression. Positioned body, processed body, body without organ.
Anorexia as refusal to acknowledge the organism-ness of our body: then is food industry exaggerating organism-ness of other’s body? Body lacking interiority that humanizes or transcends oneself, yet full of internal-organ-machine that produces fat and protein?
Animals do not have the right to refuse eating; they have to become a product.
The image of funnel forced feeding geese:
the farmer’s hand with gnarly muscle;
the white, smooth and long neck of goose in the hand;
the terrified eyes below its beak that are spread
Open
by funnel that goes deep into its throat, pushing/pumping in the substance that will enlarge its body.
And voila, Foie gras, luxury product is produced. Enjoy your dish. Garnish is an absolute necessity.
Swallow the product. Finish your dish.
Its unnaturally bloated liver is the art.
Unnatural is so in.
In factory farm, cows have to swallow the unnatural material for them to eat –corn—to live, to be fattened, to be marbled. A hole has to be drilled into her body to release the gas that would kill her otherwise. a hole represents the receptacle. Spread open beak.
Curvy body implies fertility. Wink from the stranger, and he goes,
“Was your dad a baker?”
The parents, fertility becomes the organ-machine when body becomes consumable goods.
Presented by Parents TM.
The story goes: the (impractical) scholar/writer who was told to learn practical skills learns to recognize fertile cow at the market by measuring the size of cow’s ass. Applying the same logic, he measures his future wife's ass in front of the future parents-in-law: "She will easily deliver/produce many children!"
Delivering a child. Labor. Why do all these words seem to suggest industry.
Every model is a role model: the runway becomes a march of uniformed soldier body. The runway is conveyer’s belt. And we are produced/delivered.
(I will post my second post soon after)
Like in The Cow where the violence of a body (rendered or otherwise) creates holes in time, so to does the violence in Kane's Blasted. We see what amounts to a few days after Cate's rape evolve into a collapsed time. At the end of every scene the blackouts are accompanied by rain, and the seasons pass through the type of rain indicated, so that a year has passed as Ian lays dying. Lets not even mention his rise from the dead to thank Cate at the very end, a moment in and of itself indicative of a temporality shattered by violence. And of course this could be linked to Artaud's ideas about the theatre and the plague, real theatre cant exist without the chaos that engenders, and so of course here we have perhaps a genuine piece of Artaudian theatre. Though most likely what we conceive of as theatre taking place in an auditorium of some kind with a stage et al could never be considered true Artaudian theatre.
ReplyDelete27 Wagons was predicated for me on the odd ambiguity of whether or not Flora was raped or willing slept with that guy. Her 'masochism' as read by the men in the play seems to indicate a lack of ability to be victimized. Hence Flora's husband not reading any of the double entendres they speak after her, nor reading the panic indicated on her face.
More later......
The scale of this conveyer’s belt that leads to the mouthhole of consumer can be even larger than the one between mother’s womb and consumption. The stomach can stretch 50 times its empty volume. To survive we need to swallow others; the luxury of swallowing exotic others make us forget the organism-ness in the act of swallowing. Garnish and spices.
ReplyDeleteThe logic of Eat Pray Love: It is the logic of Prey Prey Prey
If not eating, the spectacle has to fill the void, replacing the exotic swallowing. Each fasting session of Hunger Artist was concluded with beautiful ladies leading him out of his cage, the spectacle of tears, fainting, confetti, forced-feeding, affirmation of life, grounding his light body back to the World. forced celebration. Forced feeding. This resembles the decorated runway and adorned models.
I’m curious about machine and organism-ness. To exist, you have to push continue button; you have to INSERT COIN.
I’m also curious about child-likeness of anorexic body. Young child's limpy legs, the idea they represent.
So, I’ve been thinking a lot about Bataille’s notion of expenditure lately, and in the context of this week’s texts, this lens maintains its foregrounding in my read of things--particularly in Arsic’s Deleuzian reading of anorexia. This notion that to restrict/limit a “normal” consumption of food results in a transcendent kind of levitation towards the embodiment of pure affect/gesture situates itself alongside the notion of expenditure to produce several interesting (if not competing) dynamics.
ReplyDeleteIn simple physiological-economical terms, if the anorexic takes in very little or nothing (of food substance), neither can she produce much. The implication that first struck me from this logic was to think, “if production/expenditure (caloric) are restricted, then it would take her longer to arrive at a Bataille-ian excess—the place wherein one surpasses the limits of a potentiality and moves into a (potentially) destructive superfluity.” Then again, if the raw materials for sustenance/production are severely curtailed, then it only makes sense one would arrive at that nexus sooner and remain in it—the state of chaotic excess, of pure expenditure (not of the food-caloric, but of the ineffable gesture, of fashion). The body and being of the anorexic only intensifies in its physical recession, almost exponentially, consuming itself, binging on a non-, cultivating a fission of interiority, a centrifuge— embodying both the sediment and the axis, rotating around its own pole, hording a nuclear abundance, exploding supernova, flipping in death only over to a positive dark matter.
Sara Kane’s Ian, in Blasted, embodies a different manner of expenditure, however; a more conventional (over)consumption, an excess manifest as self-cultivated rot/disease—both physical and spiritual. Cate seems the heroic character for her abstinence from expenditure. I’m uncomfortable with this read, though, as it posits binaries and categorical imperatives I feel are inconsistent with Bataille.